About the game, the jam, and the future

About the creation of the game and its context :

- The game uses an engine meant to be used for a bigger project. We've been working on an engine for our own first person turn-based party-based RPG for quite some time. The jam was the occasion to make a stable version of the engine, create some proper content and share something. 95% of the content was created during the jam week. However major engine features were already there before and engine changes made during the week were 75% bug fixing and 25% rushing or simplifying some mandatory features to make them work.

- The changes for the 1.0.1 version are essentialy bug fixes, engine changes with a priority given to conveniency features such as full screen support. All content changes were made only to take into account the engine changes. One exception is art assets, a few pictures were made for the jam but many more were added with the new version. More engine changes are to be made so it's possible that another version of the game gets released someday, and that's without saying that, either way, if there's any major bug it will be fixed as soon as possible.

- The game has no sound, we are not sure when or if some sound will be added.

About the engine and future projects :

- Despite some more tool tips in the last version than in the jam version, many things are still very obscure about the game, many formula are never mentioned and stats are only described in a very abstract manner, there's no mention at all about how dice rolls work and no formula is available, and although it's not to everybody's taste, I personally think it's to the detriment of the game. The game uses mechanisms quite close to pen and paper with simple dice rolls and systems which heavily rely on stats, but at this point it's not obvious. Some relatively exhaustive rules will be available somewhere, in the game or in a separated manual. For the time being I'll leave some loose rules in a separated post. However I can't state if all or at least some dice rolls will be ultimately, at least as an option, visible in the game, minus some hidden perception rolls. I have a high preference for visible dice rolls but they must be displayed in a way which is more informative than confusing, which requires some time to set up things properly. As in a tabletop role playing game what's important is to know the results of the dice roll and the actual consequences, you don't have to know the exact difficulty of the task or what other consequences could have been possible.

- The projects made with the engine are meant to be moddable, even if modding tools might never get provided. I don't expect anybody to get interested in modding the game, but there's no legit reason why it would not be moddable. And in that regard I'm not entirely satsified with the 1.0.1 version of To Hell With Guns. Some things, like choosing a different set of tiles for different floors, leave alone for different parts of a floor, are not possible because these functionalities have not been available in the engine yet. It's not really possible to modify how combat basically works but it's very likely it'll stay that way. However what is a real issue is that many formula, typically the formula to compute the number of attacks per round you'll get depending on diverse stats, is simply harcoded and can't be tweaked at all. That's some work but the code will be reworked at some point so that this kind of formula can be changed at least to some extend without having directly to access the code.

- The content of To Hell With Guns may or may be integrated to a bigger project if the structure and settings support it. We can't talk that much of the future project(s) for the only reason that it's really vague. We've been working on very common features, like the abstract structure of the, currently only and big but it could change, dungeon and utility spells. It'll very likely there'll be both spells and guns, but wether it'll be a sci-fi space station, a modern haunted house or an old haunted house has yet to be stated. Recently we've been considering using old public domain artworks, since drawing assets is consuming time which can be used refining game systems and it's not like we can rival this kind of old artwork majesty anyway.